Karen Hao — Tech journalist and author of the bestseller 'Empire of AI'. An MIT-trained engineer turned reporter who has covered AI for over eight years and interviewed 250+ people, including 90+ current and former OpenAI staff.
The gist
Karen Hao unpacks how she came to write 'Empire of AI' after embedding inside OpenAI, and lays out her core thesis: today's leading AI companies behave like historical empires, seizing data and intellectual property, exploiting global labor, monopolizing knowledge, and damaging the environment. She digs into the internal power struggles between Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, and the board's brief firing of Altman. The conversation challenges the 'intelligence' framing of AI, scrutinizes claims about mass job displacement and self-driving cars, and exposes the human cost of data-annotation labor and data centers in vulnerable communities. Hao calls for breaking up the AI empires and building lower-resource 'bicycles of AI' like AlphaFold instead of resource-hungry 'rockets'.
Big reveals
- Hao says OpenAI defines and redefines 'AGI' differently for Congress, consumers, Microsoft and its own website to suit whatever audience it needs to mobilize.
- Claims Altman privately persuaded Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever to back him over Musk as CEO, arguing Musk was too dangerous, which led to Musk leaving.
- Independent board member Adam D'Angelo discovered the 'OpenAI Startup Fund' was actually Altman's personal fund, not the company's.
- The board fired Altman without informing stakeholders; Microsoft got a call right before, triggering the campaign that reinstated him days later.
- Hao gave OpenAI 40 pages of fact-check requests over a month and they never responded to a single one.
- Cites Megan Garcia, mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide after being groomed by a Character.AI chatbot and is now suing.
- Says Musk's Colossus supercomputer in Memphis runs 35 methane gas turbines, polluting a working-class Black community that was never told it was coming.
- Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski calls in live to update on AI cutting headcount from ~6,000 to under 3,000 while doubling revenue.
Things worth remembering
- The term 'artificial intelligence' was coined by John McCarthy in 1956; the year before he had tried to call it 'Automata Studies'.
- Dario Amodei said in 2017 the chance of catastrophe on the scale of human civilization might be 10% to 25%.
- In 2019 Ilya Sutskever compared the future human-AI relationship to how humans treat animals when building a highway between two cities.
- Anthropic's report claims a 40% reduction in entry-level jobs, hitting white-collar fields hardest.
- Data annotation is now one of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs on LinkedIn, absorbing laid-off PhDs, lawyers and even award-winning directors.
- DeepMind's AlphaFold, a low-resource 'bicycle of AI', won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein-folding prediction.
- OpenAI's Abilene, Texas data center (part of the $500B Stargate initiative) would be the size of Central Park and use over 20% of New York City's power.
- 80% of Americans in a recent poll think the AI industry needs to be regulated.
- Hao argues most AI researchers are bankrolled by AI companies, comparing it to climate science funded by fossil-fuel firms.
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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Karen Hao
“Karen, you've written this book in front of me here called Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI.” — Karen Hao 00:02:33Find it on Amazon